Speakers

Erin Malone

Workshops: Designing Social Interfaces

Designing for social interaction is hard. People are unpredictable, consistency is a mixed blessing, and co-creation with your users requires a dizzying flirtation with loss of control. We will present the dos and don’ts of social web design using a sampling of interaction patterns, design principles and best practices to help you improve the design of your digital social environments.

Designing social websites and applications, or adding a social dimension to an existing project, entails unique challenges way beyond those involved in creating experiences for individuals interacting alone with an interface. Any of the following sound familiar?

* I’m a designer being asked to add “social” to my site!
* I have an active community on my site but people are misbehaving. How can I get that under control?
* We want to build a really cool social experience around [thingy] but we’re not sure how to get people to come join the fun.
* I have a great idea for a social utility but I don’t want to have to first re-create the social infrastructure of the web inside of it.
* People come and read my content, but they’re invisible to each other. How can I peel away the layers so they can participate with each other?
* I’m worried I’m missing an opportunity to help my members connect with each other in the real world.

In this workshop, we’ll address these challenges and more. You’ll explore the landscape of social user experience design patterns and anti-patterns, focusing on the contexts in which specific interface designs work well and the unintended consequences that make some UI ideas seem like a good idea until they turn around and bite you in your app.

Starting with a foundational set of high-level practices that underpin the individual interaction, Erin and Christian will present rules and tips for how to mix-and-match the individual social patterns and best practices to create compelling social experiences. Workshop activities will involve group discussions and sketching to explore the application of social interaction patterns to specific scenarios.

Who is this workshop for?

Designers, developers, architects and product specialists all need to work together to create compelling social experiences online and this workshop will be relevant to anyone who has to plan, design, build, or bring to market social websites and applications.

What will you learn?

By the end of this very full day you will be able to:

* understand, visualize, and communicate clearly about the social design landscape
* apply a set of core social design principles to a wide variety of contexts
* create models for the representation of people and social objects in your app
* add social features intelligently (and incrementally) to an existing site
* design reputation features to enable the type of community (competitive? collaborative? somewhere in between?) you want
* enable sharing and engage organic word-of-mouth growth to launch your project
* embrace openness and leverage the existing open social infrastructure of the web
* introduce representations of presence into an experience so that your users can find and relate to each other
* tie your virtual experiences to the real world in space and time by connecting to maps, geolocation, and calendaring tools
* figure out an enterprise social media strategy for your client, boss, or startup

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Erin Malone, Principal at Tangible ux, has over 20 years of experience leading design teams and developing web and software applications, social experiences and system-wide solutions.

Prior to Tangible ux, she was at Yahoo! where she led the Platform User Experience Design team and was responsible for building the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and for providing design expertise to the popular YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library). Additionally, she led the redesign of the Yahoo! Developer Network, oversaw the redesign of Yahoo!’s Registration system, designed cross-network social solutions, developed the ux team’s Intranet and other cross-company initiatives.

Before Yahoo!, she was a Design Director at AOL leading a range of community and personalization initiatives; Creative Director at AltaVista responsible for the AV Live portal and community tools and Chief Information Architect for Zip2 which produced a custom content management system for local city guides, entertainment guides, maps and yellow pages, including New York Today for the NYTimes.

She was the founding editor-in-chief of Boxes and Arrows, a role she served for 5 years. She is the author of several articles on interaction design history and design management and a founding member of the IA Institute. Erin has a BFA in Communication Design from East Carolina University (1986), Greenville NC and an MFA in Information Design from the Rochester Institute of Technology (1994), Rochester NY.

She is the author of the book Designing Social Interfaces with Christian Crumlish for O’Reilly Media and its related site designingsocialinterfaces.com.